Zingers Don't Sting

I hate protest marching. I did a lot of it after the Brexit vote, and knew full well I was hating it. Even before I took my first step from God-knows-where-we-began (the Mall, I think) to College Green, I detested the experience. For one thing, slow walking causes a knot of frustration to build up in my stomach and it makes my legs ache. For another, why do protests always happen on hot days with fierce and unbroken sunshine?

The worst part is the cacophony. A dazzling array of banshees join marches to bang drums at other people, shout through megaphones, blow whistles and scream as though there aren't at least two-hundred living souls within ear-splitting distance. And it's not as though the messages are even coherent. Aside from the varying motivations of those who attend a march for its actual purpose, the loudest always seem to attend for their own, often unrelated, activism.

Of the hundreds of thousands of people on those anti-Brexit marches, substantial chunks were actually there for trans-rights, Palestine, climate change, race relations, and a host of other causes. All worth marching for in their own right, but it dilutes any impact of a protest if every opinion is present, particularly when some of those opinions are antithetical to it. Case in point — several groups of anarchists showed up to the anti-Brexit marches. In what world do anarchists find synergy with a supranational law-making body like the EU?

Still, I marched, again and again, hating it every time and knowing that it wouldn't reverse the referendum. Someone asked me why I bothered, I told them that marching meant standing up to be counted, that it showed those in power that however Brexit ultimately happened, they needed to consider our feelings. In the end, it didn't even achieve that.

Over to America, where millions have conducted protest marches against Trump. It’s heartening to see that 21st century America has some of the street-pounding anger of its 20th century ancestor. But it won't change anything. 2% of America protested — which is huge, for a protest — but 36% didn't even bother to vote last November and 32% voted for Trump's agenda. Numbers don't lie. The President went golfing.

Social media won't change anything, either. Not any more. There was a time when social media could be used to spread knowledge about political hypocrisy, incompetence and criminality like wildfire. The powerful quaked in the face of a Twitter storm, preemptively tended their resignations and disappeared from public view as quickly as possible. No longer.

Maybe PR crisis managers have become too good? Or social media so full of fluff that anything important gets buried? Or the public so desensitized to scandal that scandal is no longer possible? Probably a combination of all three. Whatever — zingers don't sting.

I'm spending less and less time on social media lately, and I only have accounts left on LinkedIn and Bluesky, but the latter in particular is full of #resistance libs posting objectively zinger-like content. Videos of Capitol rioters, for instance, ought to destroy Trump's aura; the stories about Kennedy Jr. doing unspeakable things to dead animals should end his career and make him a fixture of undergraduate psychiatry courses; the revelation that the reciprocal tariff calculation was nonsense should trigger some kind of crisis; Karoline Leavitt lambasting China's “theft” of American manufacturing jobs while wearing Chinese-made clothing should end her role in the debate. None of it matters because the most important book ever written is Equal Rites by Terry Pratchett.

The book's main character, a young girl named Eskerina, is described as someone who has worked out that if you refuse to follow the rules for long enough, people acquiesce so that you don't have to. The rakish aristocrats of Georgian Britain lived by that principle, and the more they drank, gambled and ploughed other men's wives, the more they got away with. Rock stars, of course, took this idea to extremes sixty or seventy years ago, even making public virtues of their hotel-smashing debauchery until Mötley Crüe set the bar too high. It was perhaps inevitable that politicians would get in on the act.

Berlusconi, Boris, Trump, whoever comes next — and it will be someone — do whatever they want (past-tense for Silvio) because they've done whatever they want for so long that everyone realizes they can't be fixed. The more they misbehave, mismanage and misjudge, the more obviously irreparable they become, thus the stronger their immunity to controversy grows, and the more we acquiesce, and the more they can misbehave, mismanage and misjudge, and so on. It's an ironclad upward spiral for dickheads.

And there is nothing to stop it, save their own tolerance for staying in the public eye. Just like car crashes and overdoses couldn't keep Vince Neil and Nikki Sixx off the stage, criminality couldn't sink Berlusconi and it won't sink Trump. The best any society can hope for is that, like Boris Johnson in Britain, their dickhead loses heart and retires to the countryside. We were blessed by his weak will, I suppose.